After-hours messages
An after-hours message is the same four facts every night — who you are, that you are closed, when you open, what to do if it cannot wait. The facts are simple; the formats are not.
What goes wrong
Opening hours are where a single script stops travelling. "9am to 5pm" is natural in English and wrong everywhere else: a German caller expects 9 bis 17 Uhr, a French caller 9 heures à 17 heures. Translating the words and keeping the English clock format produces a message that is grammatical and still sounds foreign.
The emergency number is the part that has to survive all of it. It is the one thing in the message a caller will act on, and it is a digit string, which is the thing general-purpose models are worst at.
Scripts you can use
Written to be read aloud by a machine, not by a person. The note under each one says which part a general-purpose voice model gets wrong.
Standard out-of-hours
Thank you for calling Northwind Supply. We are closed. Our office is open Monday to Friday, from 9 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon.
Written this way rather than "9am–5pm", the sentence survives translation into all five languages without a clock-format rewrite.
With an emergency route
If this is an urgent delivery problem that cannot wait until Monday, call our out-of-hours line on 0 8 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3.
Per-digit, and slow. This is the sentence the caller is writing down in the dark, and the only one they may hear twice.
Public holiday
We are closed for the public holiday and will reopen on Tuesday the 7th of April. Messages left today will be answered then.
Name the reopening day as well as the date. "Tuesday the 7th" is checkable against a calendar; "07/04" is not, and means two different days depending on who is listening.
Before you record it
- Opening hours are written in words, not clock notation, before they reach the voice model.
- The emergency number is per-digit and paced slower than the rest of the message.
- Reopening dates name the weekday as well as the date.
- Each language version was listened to by someone who speaks it. A correct translation can still have the wrong number format.
Questions
What should an after-hours phone message include?
Four things, in this order: who the caller has reached, that you are closed, when you open again, and what to do if it genuinely cannot wait. Anything more is not heard.
Do opening hours need to be rewritten for each language?
The format does, not just the words. English uses a 12-hour clock with am and pm; French, German, Spanish and Portuguese callers expect a 24-hour reading. Translating the sentence while keeping the English clock format is the most common way a localised prompt still sounds wrong.
Generate these with IVR Voice Gen
IVR Voice Gen is text-to-speech built for phone systems: digit strings, references, dates and addresses are read the way a caller can write them down, in English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. It is in early access.